Use SAS, SCSI, SATA or PATA tisks or iSCSI, AOE or FibreChannel targets

Provide iSCSI, AOE or FibreChannel targets

SAN or NAS functionality

ZFS Filesystem for unparalleled capacity & nearly unlimited snapshots

Storage for any Server application

We Work With You

Onlight will work with you to design the optimal storage solution for your enterprise. We typically work with carefully scaled NAS front-end (head) systems using the interconnect technology which makes the most sense for your needs. We couple these NAS heads with flexible DAS storage containers with an eye towards future growth, redundancy and power conservation. We populate the DAS containers with the drives which make the most sense for now and which can accommodate your expected near-term growth. As drive technology and capacity just keeps getting cheaper you can add more later, or migrate entire pools and volumes as the need arises.

Multi-level data protection

NexentaStor protects your organization’s data with features and capabilities ranging from the most granular, per transaction data integrity checks to higher level backup and disaster recovery capabilities.

Every read or write made by NexentaStor utilizes ZFS data integrity. To avoid accidental and silent data corruption ZFS provides end-to-end checksumming and transactional copy-on-write IO operations. These operations eliminate the ‘write-holes’ and silent data corruption that have plagued storage solutions that are not based on ZFS.

At a higher level, NexentaStor enables you to protect your data through a range of backup and replication capabilities including unlimited incremental snapshot capabilities. Most legacy vendor solutions are limited to 255 snapshots, which limits your freedom when setting up backup and protection schemes for your data. Other open source based solutions offer at most one or two incremental snapshots since Linux based snapshots will spike your CPU with each additional snapshot spiking your CPU that much more.

Storage without limits

The Expanding Digital Universe and continuing explosive growth of disk based storage means that limitations to legacy storage systems are going to be critically important in the months and years to come.

A storage system built upon 32bit addressing is never going to be as flexible and scalable as one built upon a 128bit system. So NexentaStor, thanks in part to the use of ZFS, has a number of advantages vs. legacy and Linux or BSD based solutions. These include:

Unlimited snapshots. With the exponential increase in the amount of data stored, snapshots need to become more granular if they are going to be able to be restored in a timely manner. Legacy solutions are limited to up to 255 snapshots. By comparison, NexentaStor can accommodate 2 to the 48th snapshots. This means you can run hourly snapshots, for example, on all of your data which in turn means that you can restore in a timely manner and that the incremental amounts sent over the network can be smaller than daily updates.

Unlimited file system size. Again, thanks to the legacy nature of many existing solutions, each file system is often limited to a relatively small amount of data stored. There are no such limits when you use NexentaStor.

Scalability: the choice is yours. With a legacy vendor or even other vendors entering the OpenStorage market you need to purchase hardware from that vendor. With NexentaStor you can scale performance the same way that you scale performance of other applications –> by adding to hardware performance by increasing memory available or CPU performance or the number of targets available. You can do all of this as and when appropriate — without paying Nexenta any additional funds.

OpenStorage: an end to vendor lock-in

Enterprises increasingly demand open systems and open business models from their vendors; with NexentaStor vendor lock-in is no longer the price of enterprise class storage functionality.

Here are some ways we are open:

Your data is your data: Because we use open standards and open approaches we do not ‘lock you in’ to a particular vendor. You can access data stored by NexentaStor via any correctly configured ZFS file system.

Almost any hardware will work: You no longer have to pay a hardware tax to your legacy vendor. Simply turn to your trusted solution provider, or find one on our site, or install the solution yourself on the server and storage server hardware you feel most comfortable with. Or, run NexentaStor as a virtual machine within your virtualized environment — the choice is yours.

Almost any disk technology will work: Local SCSI, SAS, SATA and similar can be directly employed, but NexentaStor also supports the flexibility of iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and newer interconnected storage such as Infiniband-based SAS solutions and ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE).

Almost any protocol will work: CIFS, NFS, rsync and others and we’re constantly working with various updates to capture recent improvements and to enable superior interoperability.

Almost any virtualization will work: We support almost all hypervisor solutions today and are working closely with a variety of them to improve support over time. Please contact us if you would like to learn more. Our optional virtualization storage management module is inevitably more limited in hypervisor support than NexentaStor itself, which can be easily configured as NFS or iSCSI storage for your virtualized servers.

Our API is your API: Our application clients are not simply PHP code grafted on top of underlying storage protocols. Instead, we’ve built an n-tier software application that includes a well defined API that is actually used by our management clients. You can create and record actions via our management console or you can use our Linux user environment and our documented RPC calls to integrate storage into your enterprise environment. Also our software can be managed from industry standard management consoles such such as Nagios, IBM Tivoli and HP OpenView and you can configure NexentaStor to email you when relevant performance thresholds are reached.

Open source support: As discussed in our community section, NexentaStor is built upon the open source NexentaCore Platform which itself is built upon the solid foundations of an OpenSolaris kernel and a GNU/Linux user-land. Nexenta is also a supporter of the StormOS and contributes software to various open source communities.

For more information about data storage solutions, contact one of our sales engineers at 414-272-4477 or use our contact form.

From our clients

As an investment management firm, our primary motivation for implementing OASIS was to create a seamless fail-over system for our internet access. Access redundancy is critical as we have become more dependent on the availability of the internet including email, webcasts, ftp transfers and secure websites for accessing our business partners. Any access failure has a negative impact on employee productivity leading to increased costs and user frustration. We recently experienced an internet T1 outage and with OASIS in place our internet traffic automatically routed over our other three connections.